How Much Does Monster Fundraising Matter?

"Consider the people of Columbus, Ohio, who live at the center of the political universe and are being pummeled by an ungodly number of campaign ads, most of them negative," a campaign hand who lives in Washington wrote me today. "After watching their 75th spot attacking Obama, the question is whether the next one really makes much of a difference. Since no one has ever spent like this on political ads, no one really knows. But my hunch is that the answer is no."

If you have an email account and have voted, ever, you probably were blanketed last week by weird, beseeching emails from a candidate asking for money. ("Hey, I'm not going to lie," a solicitation from Obama's finance director Rufus Gifford began, in the faux-conversational style increasingly typical of the genre.) Everybody jokes on Twitter about these missives, but campaigns —and increasingly the super-PACs—are raising eyeball-meltingly large sums. The unlimited and anonymous corporate spending isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and strategists are beginning to ask the question of whether there comes a point when the campaigns truly will have raised more money than they need. It seems awfully likely that voters will start to tune out the messages flooding their TVs. Mostly because they'll have no choice.

In two weeks we'll know for sure which side won the latest round in the money war, but it looks for now like Romney is on pace to gather more in contributions than Obama, a sitting president, a circumstance that both sides say is unprecedented. Democrats, for their part, are learning to live with being outspent.

"There's a way to get a message out efficiently without spending a billion dollars," a Democrat involved in fundraising told me. He pointed to a memo released today by Priorities USA Action, the Obama-allied super-PAC that so-far as has been vastly outraised by its Republican counterparts. Priorities has spent about $10 million on Bain-related ads since early May, according to the memo, and as the New York Times recently found, the attacks are working. Democrats contrast that with the millions spent by GOP groups.

"Koch spending isn't doing anything," the Democrat said, rather optimistically. And he made a second argument that the Republican fundraising machine might be so big and so richly fed as to be in conflict with itself. The groups funded by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, who are planning to dump more into this election than John McCain spent on his own behalf last time around, have been attacking Obama, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act decision, for raising taxes on the middle class via the individual mandate. But the Romney campaign itself still hasn't figured out its own message on whether the mandate is a tax, with advisor Eric Fehrnstrom saying this morning that it is not.

"They're going to have a lot of money, but they're going to waste a lot of money," the Democrat said of the Republican groups. "There are only so many ads you can put on TV. And if they're not helping their candidate's cause, they may well be hurting it—by blocking out messages that the campaigns actually wants voters to see."